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At long last, a federal commission is trying to deal with the
feminist regulatory outrages committed in the name of Title IX. The
recommendations passed on January 30 by the Commission on Opportunity
in Athletics are a timid start on the rocky road back from bureaucratic
mischief-making, but we still have a long way to go.

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 is a simple,
straightforward federal law requiring that schools and colleges
receiving federal funds not discriminate "on the basis of sex." The
law says nothing about equal numbers of men and women, sex-integration,
"proportionality," quotas, affirmative action, remedies for
underrepresentation or past discrimination, or even about sports.

Reasonable people would understand this law as requiring
institutions to offer equal educational opportunities to women, not as
making it the federal government's business if more women than men
enroll in women's studies courses, and more men than women play
football. But now enter from stage left a feminist named Bernice
Sandler who took over the Office of Civil Rights in Jimmy Carter's
Department of Education.

She picked the innocuous word "proportionality" out of the
dictionary (not out of the law), and turned it into a feminist code
word for one of three tests by which college athletic departments would
be judged as to their compliance with Title IX. She created a new
definition for this word: if 56 percent of a student body is female,
then 56 percent of the students playing on athletic teams must be
female.

This rule is not only unfair but ridiculous because men like to
play sports far more than women do. It's a fact of human nature that
female college students do not seek to play on athletic teams in
anywhere near the percentage that male students do.

Furthermore, a significant percentage of the female college
population is made up of "re-entry" women. Those are older women who
return to college after their children are grown or after divorce, and
they surely aren't going to college to play basketball or soccer.

In the Clinton Administration, an even more aggressive feminist,
Norma Cantu, became head of the Education Department's Civil Rights
Office. She made "proportionality" the only test for Title IX
compliance.

Using proportionality as her sword, she went on the warpath to
investigate and threaten college athletic departments even when no one
had filed any complaint. She used the power of the bureaucracy, and
sometimes activist judges, to force colleges to enforce the
proportionality ratio by a numbers count of male and female students on
teams compared to students enrolled in the college.

During the Clinton Administration, Title IX was aggressively used
to abolish college men's sports as well as to create women's teams. In
line with feminist ideological goals, the teams abolished were those
where men excel, i.e., men's wrestling, men's gymnastics, men's golf,
and football.

Colleges have eliminated 171 wrestling teams (40 percent of the
national total) plus hundreds of other sports in which men excel, many
of them trophy-winning teams. The evidence is overwhelming that Title
IX has been turned into a tool to punish men.

The effect on men's sports, and specifically on wrestling teams,
is not an unintended consequence. The feminists' intention is to
eliminate everything that is masculine or macho, and to pretend that
women are equal to men in physical prowess and desire.

The feminist implementation of Title IX has nothing to do with
equalizing the amount of money spent on women's and men's sports, as
the abolition of wresting proves. Wrestling is one of the least
expensive of all athletic teams; all wrestlers need to practice is a
mat.

Further proof that money is not the issue is shown by the fact
that wrestling teams have been eliminated even when completely financed
by alumni and supporters. So have other men's teams that were quite
willing to raise their own funds.

In 1996 the Clinton Department of Education feminists began
requiring colleges to count "walk-ons" in figuring their
proportionality quotas. A walk-on is a non-scholarship student who
tries out for a sport even though he wasn't recruited and isn't
subsidized, hoping he will get to play on the team anyway.

There are many times more male walk-ons than female, either
because more men than women are much more eager to try out for sports,
or are far more willing to sit on the bench day after day with little
chance of ever starting in a game. Colleges have been forced to meet
their proportionality goals by refusing to let non-scholarship males
try out in soccer, baseball, tennis, gymnastics, track and field,
dashing their dreams that they will ever be allowed to compete.

Since all this mischief was created, not by law, but by a stroke
of the pen in the Department of Education, we hope the Bush
Administration will use the same bureaucratic pen to terminate anti-
male implementation of Title IX and return to the rule of the law as it
was passed by Congress.